Kieran Shannon: Game recognising game - when Prince met Muhammad Ali

Did you realise how big sport was in musical genius Prince's life? 

Muhammad Ali, center, leaving the Armed Forces Induction Center in Houston, with his entourage, after refusing to be drafted. Picture: Associated Press

Sightseeing was not something the artist known as Prince was into, for all the touring he did before he left this world five years ago this week, but one afternoon in 2007, out of obligation to his childhood hero, he made an exception: to visit a greasy old cemetery in Las Vegas where Sonny Liston had been buried.

Ten years earlier Muhammad Ali’s people, supporting a World Healing project, had reached out to Prince’s camp upon learning that an MTV crew would be at the launch in Washington. Ali’s people had considered it a total long shot that someone as guarded and as busy as Prince would travel on his own dime at such short notice but within 48 hours Prince had flown in from Minneapolis: Ali’s people had him at “Muhammad wants you…”

“[They] could have said ‘Mow the lawn’ and I would have been down with it,” Prince said at the launch.

The pair immediately bonded, sharing some of their greatest secrets, moments and fears. Ali’s first fight against Liston had been all those things in one. As the referee was giving the fighters their instructions, Liston stared at his 22-year-old opponent before coldly saying, “I’m going to have to hurt you, faggot.”

At that moment Ali — in his last month known as Cassius Clay — realised all his mischief and mocking of Liston in the build up to the fight would involve a cost. The resultant first round was the most frightening three minutes of his life, surviving it, the greatest relief, and winning the actual fight, his greatest achievement.

Later when Prince had asked Ali what was his biggest regret, Ali confided that it was he’d wished he’d got a chance to apologise to Liston for being so cruel in trying to psych him out. “If you’re ever in Vegas,” he’d whisper in Prince’s ear, “could you apologise to Sonny for me?” Prince nodded, and so a decade on, a few hours before he’d take to the stage again as part of his 3121 concert residency, Prince paused in front of a pathetic grave marker.

“Sonny Liston,” Prince said, addressing the marker, “The Champ asked me to come here and apologise. He said to tell you he went too far and is sorry.”

We now know this because Prince did not go alone to Paradise Memorial Park that day. Accompanying him was a long-time acquaintance-friend called Neal Karlen who Prince gave an exclusive interview to for Rolling Stone at the height of his Purple Rain fame and reclusiveness and has recently penned a book, This Thing Called Life: Prince’s Odyssey On and Off the Record.

It is an often astonishing, revealing portrait, one of the more valuable entries into the ever-increasing Prince library. While other books have given greater insight into Prince the musician and his work and creative process, few efforts have better captured Prince the guy. For three decades Karlen, without knowing if he qualified as a friend, was someone Prince would call randomly in the middle of the night and proceed to riff off about anything from his childhood demons to racism and death, or with striking accuracy quote lines and mimic characters from The Office to The Wire and Homicide.

And no other book, to date, we can safely say, has captured just how big into sport Prince was and how big it was in his life. Sure we all knew he was handy at basketball after the famous Dave Chappelle Blouses and Pancakes skit, an episode which Charlie Murphy’s more famous brother, Eddie, recently confirmed as definitively true, only that Prince was wearing his ‘Kiss’ video half-top rather than Purple Rain-like ruffles in the club and on the court that night. [Prince also told Karlen that he changed into basketball shoes, as he did for any game of hoops, but could understand why the Murphys and Chappelle left that detail out].

But as Bill Simmons wondered in the wake of Prince’s death in 2016, “How big of a sports fan was he? I really want to read the definitive piece on [that]. If I ran into him, would there have been recognition in his eyes — ‘Oh, the white guy from NBA Countdown’ — and he’d pull me aside just to want to talk about the Bulls for five minutes?”

This Thing Called Life is that read. And as we discover from those post-midnight chats with Karlen, whatever about talking about the Bulls, Prince would often take deep dives into the latest fortunes of the Twins and the Timberwolves and the quarterback situation of the Vikings. Indeed he was so much of a fan of the latter from their run to the 1970 Superbowl when he was an impressionable 11, he even wrote them a new theme song for free in the noughties (which they declined).

As a kid he was also big into wrestling; he first bonded with Karlen for that Rolling Stone cover story back in 1985 over their mutual capacity to recall now otherwise forgotten figures like The Crusher and the Fabulous Moolah and Billy Red Cloud.

And he was obsessed about basketball. Even in his 30s out in Paisley Park while playing one-on-one against Karlen, he could imitate the signature moves of his 1970s heroes. Like given his band a cue, on the one he could yell ‘Nate!’ and then replicate Nate ‘Tiny’ Archibald’s explosive drive; on ‘Calvin!’ copy Calvin Murphy’s outside shot; then on ‘Pistol!’, drive, pull up and shoot from the hip the same way ‘Pistol’ Pete Maravich, “the first white boy who could play like a brother”, would.

In junior high school, the equivalent of being 12 to 14, Prince was apparently among the best guards in Minneapolis but after not being even let try out for his varsity high school team in both his freshman and sophomore year he’d quit the sport in disgust. And according to Karlen, it scarred and hurt him for life. Even when he was possibly the most respected and popular musician on the planet, he would shoot a glare at the name of that high school coach. There was no telling him he was only 5’2. “We would have been won state all three years if I had been running that offence,” he’d say to Karlen who in turn speculates would Prince have been a less-wondrous musician but a more rounded, content human if more of his latter teens had been spent pursuing hoops excellence.

Basketball and basketball players would continue to shape his life and chosen career though. As well as being able to imitate Walt ‘Clyde’ Frazier’s left-to-right crossover, Prince was especially taken by the New York Knicks’ guard’s style off the floor. Just like Barack Obama, the book, Rockin’ Steady: Walt Frazier’s Guide to Basketball and Cool was both a bible and a manifesto.

And then there was Ali. Although few artists have ever drawn on so many musical influences as Prince did, from James Brown to Hendrix, Sly Stone to Stevie Wonder, Karlen has no doubt whatsoever Prince’s greatest influence was the first rapper. At six he was brought to a closed-circuit theatre to watch the first Liston fight and decades on would make Karlen watch a repeat of it at least a dozen times. “To Prince,” Karlen writes, “that fight was an instruction on how to perform, entertain, outrage, show complete domination and prove the potential power of crazy over his opponents.”

And so a shy kid would later go on to write and sing anthems like ‘Baby I’m A Star’, change his name from Prince Rogers Nelson to a squiggle when fighting with his record company over who owned the masters to his own work, and even wrote a song, Ali-to-Terrell-like, called ‘What’s My Name?’

At Liston’s graveside, Karlen would tell Prince how Liston’s father used to beat him as a kid and how Harold Conrad once wrote that Liston died the day he was born. “Me too,” Prince said; his father John, jealous of his son’s musical passion and talent, regularly beat him as a kid, Karlen maintains.

Karlen also informed Prince that Liston died alone, prompting Prince to admit that was his own biggest fear: not death itself, but dying alone. In the end he would die alone but Karlen maintains he was ready to go. He never truly forgave himself for his son Amiir dying within a week of birth, believing the poor child paid for his sinful lyrics. And his body was deteriorating badly.

“There was a silent, insistent erosion of the spirit,” writes Karlen. “Not being able to dance or play basketball without soul-crushing pain is probably not an appropriate to include as a profound contributing factor on a death certificate, but in Prince’s case it should be.”

Ball meant that much to him.